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Did I remember the trip last year?

I have to say email marketing done right still works, even though we are bombarded with numerous junk on a secondly base.

That’s the subject line of an email from Airbnb, one of my favrouites sites. It was perfectly timed at the same month we went on a road trip as a family last year around the west coast.

As a digital native and also a practitioner myself, I successfully gifted a digital-driven trip to my parents, who are only barely stay digital on Wechat.

The trip started as an idea of “act while you can”. Back in 2008, I planned everything down to daily schedule with my grandma to the States. However, just the day before I asked her to go to our family doctor to get some safety med just in case. Her blood pressure turned sky high and the doctor strongly advised against going. That was it. My grandma never got to use her American visa. With that in mind, while my mom and dad are still mobile and healthy. We decided to go on a family trip.

How digital was it –

My parents’ ticket to SFO was redeemed by my Asiamile mileage online. It blew off my hard-earn 144,000 miles over the past couple of years. (To be honest, I did try to NYC, California and Dallas in less than 12 months and Bali and Amsterdam some time slightly earlier).

My ticket to SFO was bought directly from the airline website and the air tickets to Van Couvar and train ticket back to Seattle and air ticket back to SFO were all done directly on the relating sites.

I tried searching some online tool to plan for our itinery. Only the Roadtrip planner was good for a while. So I went back to the old-fashion Excel file to fill in the dates, temperature (I used Google to check the weather down to the days), where we will be, whom to meet and rough budget. I also shared that with my two aunts who we would staying with.

For the cities, we didn’t have free accomodation, we turned to Airbnb. We booked a stunning flat in downtown Van Couvar and Seattle.

We also booked the rental car in advance.

When we were on our rental car, we used Google Map to navigate to tour along California 1 and Yelp to look for resturants to dine in.

While we were not using the rental car, we ubered or lyfted. It worked perfectly fine.

We used Wechat, Whatsapps and Facebook messager to communicate with our friends and families.

It was a small step for me, but a huge leap for my parents. Look forward to our next trip Hawaii this Christmas.